Catching is baseball's most endangered position

Catcher is the one position on the field for which teams have still routinely traded offense for defense: It’s the rare position that has gainedin defensive importance this century. But no other position is threatened with having so much defensive value stripped away. An automated strike zone, which MLB has begun to experiment with, would eliminate the value of receiving, and advances in training are already shrinking the gulf in defensive skill at the position.

Yankees catching instructor Tanner Swanson told FiveThirtyEight that an automated zone would completely change the position: “It would be almost a second DH.”

People just started tracking pitch framing stats a few years ago (I still think they are largely noise) and yet if we eliminate that part of the catching job the catcher will go from by far the most important defensive position to by far the least? Not buying it at all.